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345ghostshd
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345ghosts
Antonino Coppola never expected to find himself locked into the keg cooler in the basement of his Duluth business, Sir Benedict’s Tavern on the Lake.
The thick cooler door, which he left wide open on entering, was too heavy to swing shut by itself and it would take an extra push to make it latch.
Yet there he was, inside the cooler with the door firmly closed – and locked. It was the work of the resident ghost, of this Antonino was certain. He didn’t realize that just beyond the plastic strips covering the door frame was an inside handle. So he tried his cell phone to call upstairs for help. No service. He banged on the door. No response. He cast about for half an hour before discovering the handle to get out.
Good thing Aura, his wife and business partner, had already called a paranormal study group to investigate.
It was a dark and stormy afternoon – I can’t help it, it just was – when I drove through the rain to Sir Ben’s to talk to Antonino about the spooky goings on in the English-style pub known for good food, great beer selection and weekly bluegrass and Celtic music jam sessions.
I’d met Antonino a couple of years earlier in his other business – Coppola Art Imports, half a block up the street from Sir Ben’s. The two showrooms there brim with brightly painted ceramics from Italy, Antonino’s home country.
At Sir Ben’s, it was a bustling Saturday. A couple of guys at the U-shaped wooden bar were knocking back beers (the pub has 20 varieties on tap and 97 in bottles). A few large groups cheerfully chattered over lunch. Wood-paneled walls and small overhanging chandeliers relax the space. Nice place to hang out with both liquid and ephemeral spirits, I’d say.
Antonino was as I remembered him, his short dark hair mildly salted gray and his smile broad. We settled into a side booth.
“So,” says I, “about those ghosts?” Or I said something like that, because soon Antonino, with his melodic Italian accent, was telling me about the resident ghosts.
Antonino and Aura have invited ghost hunters into Sir Ben’s two times. The first time, in October 2010 just after the cooler incident, the investigators spent an evening in the dark after the tavern closed with nothing to report.
In the winter of 2011, a different local group got more of a show. Seven gathered in a circle near one of the basement “cages” used to lock up liquor. The investigators set up equipment and it was not long before the medium with them began to cry. She needed to get some air, she said, and left.
After she went upstairs, Antonino says, the temperature started to drop. “And then we heard the cage door move. And then after, probably I’d say two minutes, the laser – a little light lit up – so that means the ghost was leaving.” The medium, Antonino says, apparently made the ghost uncomfortable; he doesn’t know why.
The ghost – or, as it turns out, ghosts – seems quite comfortable around Antonino and Aura. He’s heard screams in the elevator shaft when no one else is in the building. Alone in the basement office, she’s seen shadows flit across walls. They and their employees have heard disembodied footfalls. Startling and spooky, nothing has been full-out frightening.
Perhaps the most chilling story Antonino relates does not directly involve the tavern. One night at home, he awoke, screaming. He didn’t know why. Shortly after settling back to sleep, he got a phone call. The building in which the former tavern owners lived, not far from Sir Ben’s, was on fire. As he drove to the scene, Antonino remembered what startled him awake – a small shadowy figure tugging his foot at the end of the bed. And then he remembered something else: the former owner had mentioned the ghost of a child in her building. She saw “the little boy all the time.” Had he been seeking Antonino’s help? No one was hurt in the fire.
Several tavern guests attuned to spirits have mentioned ghosts. One spirit appears to be a mute homeless man who may have tumbled into the building’s coal chute in a bygone era. Sir Ben’s was once a gas station. It was also connected to the Kitchi Gammi Club by a tunnel, Antonino says.
One employee’s father, on his first visit to Sir Ben’s, asked permission to visit the basement and sit by the cooler in which Antonino spent an anxious 30 minutes “on ice.”
The man could perceive spirits, Antonino says.
“He told us, ‘Is a good one, is a very good spirit.’” He told Antonino that the ghost likes “shattering glass … and he likes to shuffle cards. He likes to take one or two out.”
“He’s comfortable here. This is his place,” Antonino says. “And I say, if he don’t bother me, he don’t bother me.”
Antonino is willing to forgive a closed cooler door from a ghostly prankster.
Editor's Note: Antonino and Aura sold Sir Ben’s in 2015 and moved back to Italy, where they will manage the Coppola family ceramic shop. Ghosts, we believe, had nothing to do with their decision.